Hegemonic practices in multistakeholder internet governance: participatory Evangelism, quiet politics, and glorification of status quo at ICANN meetings

This exploratory study examines a less scrutinized aspect of multistakeholder arrangements, the presence and directionality of hegemonic power in the language used in the deliberations of ten stakeholder groups who form the policy development body of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). These groups affect the most users and are the most inclusive multistakeholder internet governance structure. Using meeting transcripts from 2011 to 2020, we constructed hegemony as a latent, dependent variable (HEIN) by linking stakeholder participation to policy-making agenda. We employed a mixed-methods approach of textual linguistic analysis (using DICTION 7.1), principal components analysis, and then an autoregressive moving average model to identify the statistical significance of key variables that emerged from these analyses. We found that three primary rhetorical devices– participatory evangelism, quiet politics, and glorification of the status quo– were present and emphasized an underlying construct of power that interferes with stakeholder efforts to influence Internet governance decisions. Furthermore, the most powerful stakeholder groups within ICANN use language as influence. Four Diction variables, Commonality, Levelling Terms, Satisfaction, and Commonality at the GNSO level, yielded a positive impact on the production of hegemony, and insistence had a negative association with HEIN.